The fallen brick sat at the edge of an abandoned lot, staring up at Roberto Ramirez like a question mark. Ramirez, a sixth grader in the Bronx, had been instructed by his art teacher to search for “found objects,” and his eyes gravitated toward this small chunk of a crumbling tenement. The assignment was to envision the objects “as something else,” so Ramirez pictured the brick as a tiny building that was still standing. He took a paintbrush to its rough exterior, and after carefully outlining the building’s matchbox windows, he filled their frames with fire. Not all of them, though — only the windows on the upper floors. He knew that in the Bronx, fires started at the top.
Ramirez’s technique quickly caught on among the other kids in his class, and before long the eleven and twelve-year-olds had produced a series of fifty flaming miniatures. It was 1982, and they drew what they knew: life in a firestorm. Another student, John Mendoza, and his family had been burned out of their apartment three times by arsonists, an experience as routine as it was calamitous. Yet what the students didn’t know, beyond the rumors children sometimes absorb, was why fire was so prevalent in their neighborhood. For an explanation, they looked to their new art teacher, Tim Rollins, a white conceptual artist with ties to the downtown art scene. As an outsider in the Bronx, Rollins had no satisfying answers, so he decided on a field trip. “We go down to the Fire Department,” he recalled, and “the firemen see these ten crazy kids and me come stomping in and asking, ‘Why are there so many fires?’ ” The firefighters offered only vague replies. The students left the station dejected, but in the mystery Rollins spotted a teaching tool. He asked the sixth graders to inscribe an explanation on the bricks, and marveled, “We got 70 different reasons.” Ramirez, for one, blamed tenants who were behind on rent: he wrote “rent late” on the building’s roof. His classmate claimed that “junkies burned the buildings down,” while another wrote, “no heat.”
The students were left with concrete bricks in lieu of concrete answers. What they were attempting to do was give the bricks a history. The project became known as the Bricks series, and it was the first in a decadeslong, intergenerational collaboration called Kids of Survival (or K.O.S.), so named because “we were broke but not broken.” One of the Bricks now sits in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The question haunting the Bricks series to this day is why the students suggested “70 different reasons” for the conflagration that upended their lives and engulfed their neighborhoods. How could the toll from the fires have been so colossal and its source so opaque?
Seven years earlier, in April 1975, a different act of painting offered some insight. Smearing black pigment onto their hands and faces, landlord Imre Oberlander and his associate Yishai Webber prepared to torch one of the former’s six buildings in the South Bronx. The white incendiaries believed blackface would offer them cover, like a perverse kind of safety gear. At four a.m. on a Friday morning, the two men cruised down Southern Boulevard en route to the targeted building. They hoped the twilight would provide further protection, but when they drove past a police car, their broken taillight caught the attention of the officers on patrol. Pulling them over on the wide thoroughfare, the policemen saw two Hasidic men from Williamsburg made up in blackface, one wearing a wig, and proceeded to search the car. They found two “firebombs ” —crude incendiary devices made out of gasoline, gunpowder, and a timing device.
Oberlander became one of the first landlords charged in connection with the decade’s “epidemic of arson,” as the New York Times had begun to call it. Though the Bronx, in particular, had been burning for years by this point, authorities remained so oblivious to the root causes that they initially suspected Oberlander and Webber of being spies en route to the Soviet diplomatic compound, ten miles away, at the opposite end of the borough. It is true that the firestorm involved vast conspiracies, transnational dealings, and a doctrine of containment, but it all had little to do with the Cold War. What drove the arson wave was profit. Oberlander had collected $125,000 (nearly $750,000 in 2024 dollars) in insurance payouts from twenty-one separate fires between 1970 and 1975. All his claims were “paid off without a murmur from the insurance company,” railed Bronx District Attorney Mario Merola, warning without hyperbole that this was just “a drop in the bucket.”
Between 1968 and the early 1980s, a wave of landlord arson coursed through cities across the United States, destroying large portions of neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. From Boston to Seattle, tens of thousands of housing units burned (this is a conservative estimate); the most affected neighborhoods lost up to 80 percent of their housing stock. Yet historians have largely neglected the burning of the nation’s cities, and popular memory has commonly confused the 1970s arson wave with the well-documented but far less destructive urban uprisings of the previous decade. The 1960s rebellions — most famously Watts in 1965, Newark and Detroit in 1967, and everywhere after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 — were born of Black (and in some instances Puerto Rican) outrage over the persistence of white supremacy despite the tangible gains of the civil rights movement. In most cases set off by an incident of police violence, the rebellions represented a collective revolt against not just overpolicing but the daily persecution of Black communities in the form of unequal employment, housing, education, and more. Though these events were often deemed “senseless riots” devoid of a coherent politics, they were formidable and far-reaching — though fledgling — insurgencies. Historians typically describe this era as stretching from Birmingham in 1963 to the nationwide uproar following MLK’s murder in 1968, although important recent work has tracked the rebellions into the 1970s.
Whether measured in dollars or lives lost, the destruction caused by the uprisings of the 1960s pales in comparison to the arson wave of the 1970s. In 1967, the most violent year of the decade, the number of dead were counted in the tens and the insurable losses totaled $75 million. By contrast, at least five hundred people died of arson annually across the United States during the 1970s, and by 1980 the New York Times was estimating that arson caused $15 billion in total annual losses. Admittedly, these are crude and fraught barometers of historical significance. The rebellions had immense political implications on a national scale, and they justifiably loom large within the popular imagination. The 1970s blazes were perhaps too common, too consistent with existing iniquities, to draw the same kind of attention.
The latter decade was defined not by insurrection but by indemnification, though the two were connected, as we will see. The 1970s conflagrations bring into view the untold history of the racially stratified property insurance market, a key force in the making and remaking of American cities. Although fire usually requires only oxygen, heat, and fuel, the crucial ingredient during that decade was state-sponsored fire insurance, initiated by federal fiat in response to the 1960s uprisings. The reform effort was supposed to put an end to insurance redlining, which had left entire swaths of the American city uninsured or underinsured due to the race and class of their residents. Yet increased access to second-rate fire insurance, when paired with state cutbacks and ongoing mortgage redlining, incentivized landlord arson on a vast scale.
The Bronx lost approximately 20 percent of its total housing stock to fire or abandonment between 1970 and 1981—around 100,000 units, nearly the equivalent of the number of housing units in today’s Richmond, Virginia, or Reno, Nevada. Destruction on this scale, unfathomable as it may be, should not be seen as evidence of the Bronx’s exceptionality. The arson wave hit cities across the country, in every region. Coast to coast, Black and Brown tenants were blamed for the fires. Yet the evidence is unequivocal: the hand that torched the Bronx and scores of other cities was that of a landlord impelled by the market and guided by the state.
That hand was also, in the case of Imre Oberlander, covered with dark pigment. Who was the audience for this 4 am racial masquerade? Was it the building’s tenants, the block’s bystanders, the beat cops? Whomever they imagined as potential witnesses, Oberlander and Webber were performing a well-rehearsed script of Black and Brown incendiarism. The specter of the Black firesetter, in particular, is older than the United States itself. For the two white arsonists, the racist trope was something to exploit. The landlord and his accomplice believed it could deflect blame and prevent them from being identified. They applied blackface as though it, too, were a form of insurance.
Oberlander and Webber may have also seen blackface as a shield against a different bigotry — that of “Jewish lightning.” The stereotype of the arsonist Jew was a vestige of medieval anti-Semitism that was modernized by fire insurers in the mid-19th century, when underwriters at Aetna, the Hartford, and other notable firms warned against issuing policies to “Jew risks,” in part because of Jews’ supposed proclivity for fraud. The stereotypical arsonist, whether in its anti-Semitic or anti-Black variant, fulfilled a similar function: distracting from the larger power structures at work. In the 1970s, the Jewish slumlord became a potent symbol of Black exploitation, but in fact the redlining banks and insurance companies had, to different degrees, discriminated against both Black and Jewish communities.
The irony in Oberlander and Webber’s blackface gambit was that the two men ended up getting caught precisely because their performance of Blackness was both too convincing and too implausible. That is, their apparent Blackness may well have played a role in the police officers’ decision to pull them over, and their thinly veiled whiteness — upon closer inspection — almost definitely prompted the search of their car.
Few landlord arsonists actually made a habit of wearing blackface, because few had a need for it. The arson wave was made possible by financial masquerade—an array of insurance and real estate practices that obscured accountability and diffused risk — combined with official neglect and the presumed criminality of the Black and Brown tenants held culpable for the fires. Instead of blackface, landlords often chose more cunning disguises, such as hiring paid “torches,” usually neighborhood teenagers, to do the burning for them. But that was just the opening scene of a multi-act white-collar revue, one that featured Hollywood studios dishing out Bronxploitation films, journalists vilifying the supposed welfare arsonist, underwriters flooding cities with subpar coverage, insurance executives feigning impotence, real estate players attacking rent control, criminologists theorizing about broken windows, lawmakers gutting the fire service, and pundits yammering on about riots and pyromaniacs. All sang the same chorus, drowning out dissenting voices as well as the true origins of the arson wave. Blackface was not necessary when there was such a vibrant tradition of briefcase minstrelsy.
The torching of wide swaths of the American metropolis may strike some as a bizarre event in the distant past. Yet it is very much part of how our cities came to be. Long neglected by historians, the 1970s arson wave vividly reveals late-20th-century shifts in political economy that still shape our lives. Out of its embers was forged the metropolis we know today: one defined by volcanic real estate booms, economy-cratering busts, and an ongoing decline in housing stability. The world in which a solidly built home could generate more value by ruination than habitation is the same world in which homelessness, eviction, and foreclosure have become defining aspects of urban life.
The story of landlord arson is not a cautionary tale of capitalism gone awry, of a few bad apples, of uncaring policymakers, of government overreach, or of a grittier bygone era. To frame it as a singular, sensational episode of the past is to gloss over its continuities with — and its role in creating — the structures of the present. Warning against such “spectacularization of black pain,” Saidiya Hartman counsels that “shocking displays too easily obfuscate the more mundane and socially endurable forms of terror.” The arson wave renders visible much that is hidden in plain sight, historically and to this day.
Over the last 50 years, housing insecurity and real estate volatility have come to define our cities, and though there are many causes, none is more significant than financialization, which surged in the years after 1968. Financialization is the process by which an economy that was once organized around the making and trading of physical commodities becomes increasingly oriented around the profits from financial activity. The high finance we know from the nightly news and the silver screen is found on the fiftieth floor of a glass-encased skyscraper and in the cacophonous pits of a stock exchange, fueled by adrenaline, greed, and cocaine. The image we have is set a thousand feet in the air, its spoils and scandals a world apart, even if they eventually touch the rest of us. But this is not the only face of financialization, nor necessarily the one that sheds the most light on the crises of the present. The arson wave opens up a view of financialization from the ground up and far from the fray of Wall Street.
The stock image of the 1970s American city features an urban economy in decline. It is rarely acknowledged that there were profits to squeeze from the destruction of the metropolis, particularly in neighborhoods of color. The ascendance of the FIRE industries on the heels of the civil rights movement created conditions primed for plunder, especially in cities suffering from the flight of white residents and well-paying jobs. “Instant liquidity,” as one arsonist for hire described it in his testimony before Congress, was the real estate equivalent of Wall Street’s liquidity preference: the priority placed on an asset’s ready convertibility into cash. What made buildings liquid was property insurance expansion, presented as a means of racial justice and redress. Which is to say that race underwrote the gains enjoyed by landlords.
For those looking to make a quick buck, the Bronx and other communities of color possessed a peculiar asset: the powerful alibi of racial pathology. The presumption of Black and Brown criminality blotted out the fact of dispossession so completely that, all these decades later, the vague impression that Bronxites burned down their own borough endures, while the vast fortunes made were forgotten. The peril of getting caught perpetrating fraud thus transferred to its victims, where it has long remained.
Excerpted from Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by Bench Ansfield. Copyright © 2025 by Bench Ansfield. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.